This morning we attended the Oaks Christian Middle School's annual 8th grade awards breakfast. We said "hi" to our friends, listened to the speeches, clapped politely for the award winners, and were mildly bored. And then ... "the award for the 2011 Most Outstanding Student in Drama goes to ... Megan Eichhorn!"

YAY Megan!

Who knew? And her drama teacher told a very nice story about Megan auditioning for the part of Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It; "... and so I asked her 'what made you come out for this part', and she said 'I don't know, I just feel like I want to do this', and I thought 'wow I really like this kid'..."

By the way now I can tell you, I am planning to take off the entire summer. Twelve weeks. Details to follow :)

Did you follow the iCloud Jobsnote yesterday? I was *busy* all day, but I did make time to watch it a little ago. Not a classic - and Steve himself didn't do a lot of it - but some interesting stuff was announced. This shift of "the truth" from your desktop to the web has been happening gradually, and I'm glad to see Apple is getting on board. They track record with online services is a bit spotty, so we'll see how well they do.

BTW I did think the IOS 5 enhancements quite worthwhile, especially making taking a picture easier. I am going to use the heck out of that. And the notification redesign is a much-needed improvement, now looks and acts a lot like HP / Palm webOS...

Apple has been on a roll lately, but there was a time when people were writing articles about how they were already dead. Same for Amazon. I thought this was interesting... Jeff Bezos on innovation at Amazon. They definitely take the long view, and so do Apple. Of course you have to stay alive long enough to see the long view happen :)

Hipmunk: all about the UI. You got that right. I have switched completely from using Kayak to find flights to using Hipmunk, and the UI is the only reason. It shows flights the way you want to see them so you can easily pick the right one.